The World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous part of modern life. Correspondingly, web development is a burgeoning industry. Web development differs from traditional software development in several profound ways. In response to an HTTP request from a browser, a web server can send a response (e.g., an HTML document) back to the browser. After the browser has loaded the document received from the server into the browser, a scripting language that adds interactive features to the web page may add, delete, or modify contents in the document.
The way web processing works affects web development. For example, after the scripting language executes, the view presented by the browser can differ from the view that was produced from the original file that came from the web server. Similarly, the underlying HTML from which the view is generated can differ from the original HTML that was received from the web server. There is presently no automated way to map a selection in the browser back to the HTML file received from the web server.